


our nights were made for pillow talk (oh darling, darling; my lips are sealed)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: run baby run [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5 Things, BAMF Darcy Lewis, Dancing, F/M, Mother Hen Bucky Barnes, Nightmares, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7847353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite their first meeting (or, well, no, they met earlier, but the first time Darcy Eliza Lewis looked at James Buchanan Barnes and saw him), it takes time for Darcy to understand the man who walks like a ghost, with Death following in his step, but takes her hand gently, and runs. She learns him in fragments, as he pieces himself together.</p>
<p>It’s a process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our nights were made for pillow talk (oh darling, darling; my lips are sealed)

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted to [my tumblr](http://mouseymightymarvellous.tumblr.com/post/149072113254/our-nights-were-made-for-pillow-talk-oh-darling).

##### i. shell shock

Darcy sits on the suspicious bed of the really, really terrible hostel room they’ve ended up in and thinks that she may have miscalculated.

This, she tells herself, is what you get for watching too much Doctor Who.

The trembling, terrified, traumatized man who triggered her protective instincts earlier in the street has retreated behind a mask more cold and barren than the tundra her Baba and Deda fled from.

She bites at her lips and rips absentmindedly at the skin around her nail beds, hyperaware of her nerves under the ice-blue stare James has trained on her. “What now?” she asks.

It is probably much too late to be asking that question.

A deep furrow appears between his eyes and his full mouth turns down as he sets his jaw. He looks away, momentarily uncertain, and then focuses those tundra eyes back on her. “We disappear. Like ghosts.”

Darcy tilts her head, considers the man standing before her. His mouth, she thinks, is much too vulnerable for a man capable of dealing out so much precise violence. He has deep bruises pressed under his eyes and ragged hair, his battered clothes sit awkwardly on his broad frame; as Darcy stares at him, she can feel the planes of his face tugging at her memory.

“Why,” she asks, the syllables dragging from her mouth as she tries to think through the questions she wants to ask, needs to ask, “do we need to disappear?” And why, she wonders, like ghosts.

James looks away again, a muscle ticking in his jaw as his brows furrow further. “Hydra.”

Darcy barely bites back a curse, because fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. That’s just. Yeah.

When the Shieldra files had poured onto the ‘net, Darcy had trawled through what she could, like anyone with even an iota of computer literacy, and she has spent months following the news and the committee hearings, and she has discussed and debated the implications of a nazi-adjacent organization being embedded within national and global organizations. Hydra had been more legend than fact, the relevant SSR files still mostly classified, and for the world to see them as what they were and as what they became? Well, Darcy hadn’t needed her poly sci degree to know that the world would change for having seen some of the dirtiest secrets to have ever been buried. 

But that only came after the shock had faded. The first thing Darcy had done when the world ground to a halt as SHIELD burned and the sky fell down over Washington, DC was scan through the list of Project Insight targets.

She’d thrown up when she’d found herself and Jane and Erik.

And then she’d had screaming nightmares after she dug too far into some of the human experimentation files that were kicking around. All too easily, that could have been Darcy had Jane let them get drawn any further into SHIELD’s orbit, had Darcy dared prod any deeper into their systems beyond the backdoor she maintained to keep eye on the work they’d appropriated from Jane.

And oh. That is a metal arm that James is revealing by pulling the bloody glove off his left hand. A very, very not at all flesh and bone, metal arm.

Darcy _recognizes_ that metal arm.

“Hydra,” she says, “we’re running from Hydra. And your name is James.”

He sounds uncertain when he says “yes.”

Darcy breathes through the impulse to ask about the fight on the bridge, about the identity of the masked man firing on Captain America and the glare of the sun off something metal that the intrepid news crews captured.

And yeah, ok, Darcy wasn’t super into history back in high school and she wrote her Howling Commandos essay on Agent Margaret "Peggy" Carter, because duh. But Darcy also grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons and bad hyper-patriotic action movies and yep. That is definitely Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes standing in front of her, because whenever Darcy thinks her life has reached a new, impossible plateau of weird, it somehow gets even weirder.

She could be wrong, but no, she’s pretty sure she’s not.

“Bucky,” she tries, and he _flinches_. Darcy aches, angry at herself, even though she couldn’t have known, doesn’t really know what it is she knows from that painful, desperate lurch of his body as he curls into himself.

“Or not! Ok, not Bucky, James. We’ll stick with James!” Darcy has her hands outstretched, afraid that touching him will just make it worse.

James shudders, and pulls his shoulders back through what looks like pure force of will. His face is colder, the lines drawn more harshly, and Darcy curses herself for the blunder. This is, she thinks, not going to be the only time she pulls that cold out of his bones.

Darcy has definitely miscalculated.

There is nothing about this that she can fix.

##### ii. bald face

“You know,” Darcy ventures, still tentative as she feels out the bounds of this new partnership she’s thrown herself into, “we should do something about all that.”

James frowns at her, a question.

Darcy waves a hand, trying and failing to encompass the monstrosity that James has allowed to take over his face. “The beard. It’s shot right past lumbersexual and straight into Cousin It territory.”

She catches him mouthing “lumbersexual?”, but continues on, undeterred.

“Seriously, Hagrid, we need to do something about the beard. You’re scaring young children.”

And yeah, that was a bit harsh, but not too far from the truth. The beard is catching _attention_ , ok, they have enough to worry about what with the metal arm, James’ murder eyes and Darcy’s inability to speak Portuguese.

James rubs self-consciously at the small animal on his face. “It disrupts facial recognition scans.”

“Dude, I am all for staying off of Hydra’s radar -” and that of any other intelligence or military organizations looking for the Winter Soldier, “- but seriously, there has got to be a better option.”

Darcy isn’t really sure what that option might be, but it has to exist. For her peace of mind.

“Fine,” James nods, mostly unconvinced, but concedes defeat to Darcy’s superb powers of argumentation.

Of course, when he disappears into the bathroom later that day with a straight razor and soap that he’s procured in the short half hour he’s been out - Darcy’s impressed and vaguely terrified - she is in no way prepared for what walks out of the impossibly tiny wash closet.

Darcy, she will later adamantly assert, does not get weak-kneed at the sight. But, James Barnes walks out of the bathroom topless, a damp towel thrown carelessly over his metal shoulder, and that fucking chin dimple on display, and yeah, Darcy is definitely thankful she’s perched on the edge of a table.

“How ‘bout it, Doll?” he asks, and she would slap the smug off that stupid face if it weren’t such a good look on him. “Am I still gonna be scarin’ kids?”

Darcy sniffs, and wills the blush from her cheeks. “It’ll do, I suppose.”

James stalks closer, bends his knees a fraction to bring his face down to hers. “Yeah?” he murmurs. “Guess I’ll just have t’ try harder next time.”

And what the hell? Darcy wants to demand. Who is this man that knows the perfect amount of space to leave between their bodies to make her want to sway forward to close the gap? Who is this man with a predatory gleam in his eye that doesn’t promise violence but pleasure?

She was not at all prepared for the James who walked out of the bathroom.

She should never have complained about the beard. Darcy could handle the beard. What Darcy cannot handle is this new creature wearing James’ skin like it’s a goddamn piece of art.

He needs to decide on one personality and stick with it. She’s getting a vicious case of whiplash.

He smirks at her again, and then ambles back to the bathroom to deal with the mess he’s left.

(He doesn’t stick around to deal with the mess he’s made of her.)

Oh, Darcy glowers, it is _on_.

##### iii. back alley brawls

“The hell, Darcy?” James demands, an angry snarl on his face, but his hands are careful as they search her for injuries. “You were only supposed to be gone a half hour for food!”

“I’m fine!” she declares, swatting at him where he’s rucked up her sweater to check her back for bruising. “Off! Get off!”

His hands are off her so fast, she might as well have burnt him. James pales. “Shit! Fuck! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have touched you without your permission. Jesus, Darce, y’know I’d never hurt you like that?”

Darcy blinks at him, confused for a moment before, “Oh, God! James, no! That’s not. I wasn’t,” she stumbles, horrified that he thought she might believe him capable of any kind of sexual violence. Doesn’t he know that she _trusts_ him, with everything she has? “I’m fine. I did the thing you showed me, he didn’t get the chance to touch me.”

It’s a lie, but a white one.

James snarls again, reminded of the man currently crumpled on the alley floor. Darcy doesn’t flinch at the sound, rather her own lip raises to mimic the gesture, disgust and fury aching in her teeth.

She’d been on her way back to their latest apartment when a man holding up one of the peeling storefronts hadn’t appreciated her disregard for the lewd remarks he’d shouted at her across the street. He had appreciated the broken hand when he’d tried to swing her around to face him even less. Her head aches from where he’d dragged her by the hair into the alley, and she knows she’ll have a few wicked bruises from the struggle, but her knuckles sting from where she’d held her own, and she certainly isn’t the one currently bleeding sluggishly on the ground. James’ training had certainly seen to that.

James himself had arrived just in time to find Darcy panting for breath, adrenaline screaming through her veins and her eyes wild about the edges, her assailant on the ground.

The only reason the man is still alive is that James had been more worried about her physical state to spare the insensate man much thought.

Now that he’s assured himself she’s okay though - to a certain degree of okay - his focus shifts down, his gaze freezing over into something dark and dangerous.

(Winter, Baba once told her, is not kind in the Motherland. It takes no prisoners. You survive, or you don’t. You must be strong, Зайка, and you must be brave and you must be lucky.)

“James,” she calls, despite the ache in her teeth and the snarl on her face. “Leave him, he’s learned his lesson.”

“He hasn’t,” says the Winter Soldier, “men like him never do.”

“He isn’t Hydra. We agreed, no other casualties, those are the rules.” (Darcy hates the rules, that there needs to be rules, but she knows that somedays they’re the only reason James can take a single step on his own.)

“It’s men like him who create the space for Hydra to exist.”

Darcy smooths her tongue along the front of her teeth, and feels her bones reverberate with the memory of every injustice she has swallowed down, every slight and attack on her heritage and her class and her gender. She swallows down this too. She’s strong enough to bear it.

“Not like this,” she rasps. “This isn’t how we build a better world. We have to be kinder. We can’t burn this hydra to the ground; it’s in our governing bodies and our legislature and our media and our goddamn supermarkets.”

“We can try.”

“Not like this,” she repeats. But oh, does Darcy wish they could.

The plates in his arm whine as they recalibrate, but then James relaxes and lets some of the ice bleed out of his eyes. “Fine. Not like this.” His mouth is still twisted into something angry, something that calls to the ache in Darcy’s teeth. “It’s not right, though.”

“No,” Darcy agrees, “it isn’t.”

She turns to salvage the groceries, frowning at the way they’re strewn across the ground. James is still glaring at the man.

“We fight injustice, in all of its iterations, as much as we can, and we stay kind,” Darcy tells him, the words scraping her throat raw. “If we can’t still be kind, then we’ve lost.”

James looks at her, straight through her, and Darcy doesn’t quite know what he sees. “I can do this all day,” he murmurs, pensive, and then startles, shakes his head free of confusion and ice. “C’mon, Darce.”

She lets him sling his flesh and bone arm around her shoulders, leading her out of the alley and into the street.

##### iv. impression

She comes to, suddenly, a low pained moan tearing her from sleep.

For a moment, she thinks that it must have been her own. She doesn’t always have nightmares, but she’s more than used to the strange amalgamations of fire and darkness and helplessness that her brain pieces together from time to time.

Another moan fills the room, and nope, that was definitely not Darcy, which means James.

She’s never seen James have a nightmare before. Although, to be fair, she’s barely ever seen James sleep. Cat naps and dozes so light he wakes at passing cars, sure, but barely ever sincere, guards lowered, drool-on-the-pillow sleep.

Darcy hesitates. If it were Jane, she’d crawl into the other bed, wrap herself around her friend and smooth her hair back, mutter inane stories until Jane woke or calmed. She doesn’t know what to do for James, doesn’t know where the lines are or how far she can push them.

Another moan, this one fading out into a whimper, and Darcy _moves_ without really thinking it through, she just needs to get to the source of that distressed sound and make it _stop_ because it _hurts_ her to listen to.

She isn’t particularly graceful as she stumbles between the beds, but she manages to not slam her foot into anything, or trip, so she’s counting it a win.

A crack in the curtains allows a streak of light to fall across the bed, giving Darcy a decent view of James’ face twisted up in pain once she gets close enough to make out details without her glasses.

Unthinkingly, Darcy reaches out to smooth away the pain etched into his forehead.

And then promptly gets pulled onto the bed and an arm across her throat for her trouble.

Darcy blinks up at James where he’s pressing her into the mattress with what she can only assume is a comical expression of shock. His gaze is unfocused, unseeing.

“James,” she rasps, “it’s Darcy. It’s ok. You’re safe. You know me, I’m not going to hurt you.”

It’s a bit absurd, really, that she’s reassuring a man who probably has a hundred pounds over her, decades more martial experience, and who currently has a dangerous weapon to her throat. And yet, he looks more afraid than she feels.

“It’s Darcy,” she continues, “we met in Bogotá, Colombia almost a year ago, when you joined No Capes. We’ve been travelling together for three weeks.”

As she continues to talk about herself and how he knows her, her throat aching, the pressure eases, and the fractured look in James’ eyes starts to fade. Suddenly, he snaps completely awake, and throws himself off of her. The horror on his face breaks her heart a little bit.

“I’m -” he flexes his hand, curls up on the floor beside the bed.

“We’re all good,” Darcy promises him, cringing at her hoarse voice. She sounds like she gargled broken glass and rusty nails; it doesn’t exactly do a good job of conveying “all good”.

“I hurt you,” he grinds out. And yeah, alright, she’s already starting to bruise.

She shrugs. “It takes two to tango. I probably should have known better than to try to shake a master assassin out of a bad dream.”

He flinches. Darcy sighs. She’s theoretically trained for this, she really should know better when dealing with a man with decades worth of trauma.

“What were you dreaming about?” she asks, changing the subject.

James frowns. “I’m,” he licks his lips, “I’m not sure. It fades even as I remember.

“Y’know,” Darcy muses, “I might have something for that.”

“Yeah?” He sounds hopeful, like Darcy has never heard before.

She thinks of curating Jane’s stream of consciousness notes, of unicorn bedazzled dream diaries, of talismans and touchstones.

“I don’t know if it will help, but yeah.”

“I want to stop forgetting,” James tells her, a midnight secret.

And oh. Oh, oh, oh. That bruises more deeply than the arm pressed to her throat.

“I’ll help you chase them,” she promises fiercely. “And I’ll help you keep them.”

Memories, she thinks, that all they’re made of, really. Memories and stardust, maybe.

“Yeah?” James breathes.

“Yeah.”

Darcy doesn’t know what she’s going to have to make herself into to keep these promises she keeps giving him, the need for them pulled from deep in her bones. (It isn’t _right_ , the _world_ isn’t right, that this man can have endured so much hurt, and still hurt and hurt and hurt, even as he tries to heal.) She wonders, as she lays there on the bed where James had flipped her, James sliding into something not quite sleep on the floor, if she will recognize herself when this is all said and done.

The way she’s willing to brush off the bruising on her throat suggests that she might not.

As she drifts off, she dreams her hands are bloody in the moonlight.

##### v. lindy hop

They’re dashing through backstreets, trying to outpace the local authorities streaming towards the smoking crater of the Hydra facility.

“What happened?” Darcy demands, not appreciating being pulled behind James as they sprint through the dark.

Coms had gone down long minutes before the explosion, leaving Darcy with her heart in her throat as she sat in front of the fuzzing computer screens in the deserted office space of a building several blocks away. She’d had to close her eyes and trust in the Winter Soldier’s skills when the windows had rattled with the force of the explosion and the night sky had lit up with hellish flames. She couldn’t have helped the relieved way she’d thrown herself at James as he rushed into the dark office even if she’d wanted to. He’d given her a moment to cling, breathless and trembling, before he’d hustled her and the equipment down the stairs and out onto the no longer quiet streets.

“Triggered an automated self-destruct mechanism.”

Darcy curses. “Did you get the intel we needed?”

James nods and gestures to one of his front pockets.

“Well that’s good at least. Are you injured?”

“Nothing that won’t heal on its own,” he waves off.

He keeps pulling her into shadowed doorways and around corners, avoiding the police flooding the area. Darcy scowls at a particularly vicious yank that causes her to stumble and crash into his chest.

“Damnit,” James growls. “There’s no way we’re going to get out of the area without being spotted.”

Darcy knows without being told that this is because of her. James can turn to shadow and mist, but she can’t do the same, and she’s holding him back.

“We should split up,” she tells him. “There’s no way the police will give me a second glance on my own, and you can parkour your way across the rooftops, or something.”

James can manage to pack a surprising amount of scorn into a single raise of an eyebrow. “And leave you alone?” he demands.

Darcy shrugs. “Well, yeah. I don’t exactly scream ‘dangerous assassin’. I’ll just pretend to be a lost tourist if I get stopped.”

“No.”

“What’s your suggestion, then?” she asks, her back up. She can take care of herself. “You’re the one who said we aren’t getting out of this without being seen.”

James glances off into the space over her shoulder, obviously thinking.

“We disappear into a crowd,” he declares, and pulls her along again behind him.

Darcy doesn’t appreciate the lack of elaboration, but she can guess at his meaning when she starts to hear the heavy thump of music rolling out from a nondescript building around a corner and along a more brightly lit street than the ones they’ve been travelling. Couples and groups in a variety of club wear - from sequins and sparkles to leather and grunge - are coming and going from what is evidently a fairly popular spot.

Darcy jerks them back around the corner. “A club?”

James shrugs. “Lots of people, busy enough that no one will remember us.”

“We aren’t exactly dressed for dancing,” Darcy drawls, gesturing towards James’ combat gear and her own creeping about in the dark clothes. Although, the murder boots they’re both strapped into and James’ black cargo pants are just a more realistic version of the pseudo-military gear some of the punks she spotted have on. “You’ve got another shirt on under that, right?”

A quick clothing exchange, a strategic use of a throwing knife and a hasty application of eyeliner later, and Darcy thinks that she’s managed to create a fairly successful illusion of two people headed out to the club for a night of dancing. The dark grunge look she’s got going on isn’t exactly her preferred style, but considering that she’s currently attempting to hide from the police after being involved with blowing up a building and taking down a Hydra cell, she’ll take it.

James gives her an assessing once over. “You’re sure we’ll pass?”

“Mostly,” Darcy says, taking a moment to appreciate the way his cargo pants cling to his thighs. “What do we do with the equipment?”

James stashes the duffle bags under a dumpster. “I’ll come back for them tomorrow.”

“Alrighty.” Darcy takes a deep breath. “Showtime.”

She’s self-conscious of the way James’ shirt hangs off her body, only just covering her. A couple of strategic cuts - thank God for summer camps and the knowledge of how to cut up unflattering unisex t-shirts - mean that the neckline is bordering on scandalous, but at least it looks less like she’s wearing a man’s shirt as a dress.

James, of course, looks like some kind of model with his loose hair and the long, dark line of him. The eyeliner just makes his eyes look more blue and more dangerous.

Darcy tenses as they approach the crowd in front of the door, the music starting to pound through her feet, and her heartbeat shifts to match the tempo. She fidgets as they wait in line, hyperaware of the smell of blood and ash clinging to them. Luckily, the bouncers just wave them through with nothing more than a quick glance over.

James leads her through the door with a hand to the small of her back, and she sinks into the light contact, lets it and the music leech the stress from her body.

The lights are dim, making the people on the dance floor indistinguishable, reducing them to a roiling mass of limbs. Disappear into a crowd? Yeah, they can definitely do that.

A new song starts, the beat dropping, and Darcy lets herself sway with it, the adrenaline of the evening smoothing into something less aggressive. She feels the movement of her body turning fluid, puts a swivel in her hips. She drops her head back, shakes her hair down her back.

The curls catch slightly on James’ fingers where they’ve twisted into the back of her shirt-dress.

Darcy turns. She has to go up on her toes to speak into his ear over the noise. James steadies her with a hand to her elbow as she wobbles. “You’ve gotta relax. You’re way to stiff! You’ve gotta look like you’re here to dance, not hide from police after blowing up a building!”

“I’m not sure,” he says, nodding at the writhing crowd, “that whatever they’re doing can be called dancing.” But regardless of his doubt, he listens to her, and does something that transforms his stance from militant to loose and liquid, and she’s curving into him before she can think better of it.

James raises an eyebrow in challenge, and Darcy grins, grabs him by both hands, and tugs him into the crowd.

By the time they’ve shimmied their way into the mass of bodies, Darcy has James plastered along her back, his heavy metal hand resting low on her abdomen, their hips moving together.

She looses track of time, each song blurring into the next, a wall of sound meaningless but for the beat that pounds through them, reverberating in their ribcages. She looses track of most anything but the shock of heat along her back, the wet warmth of breath against her neck, hard thighs snug under hers, sure hands on her hips.

In the morning, when they stumble out of the club and into the rising sun, she would swear that James had pressed the promise “one day, sweetheart, I’ll take you to do some real dancing” into her throat. But she might be wrong, it might have only been a dream.

Day is dawning, and the night is already evaporating off her skin.


End file.
